


Nothing's As Bad As It Seems

by KokoScripsit



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, It's Okay, Nobody Dies, Trope Subversion/Inversion, Virgil just overthinks everything, anxiety medication, attempted self-sacrifice
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-23 17:05:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19705717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KokoScripsit/pseuds/KokoScripsit
Summary: Virgil has convinced Thomas to try anxiety medication.





	1. Prologue - Anything for You

**Author's Note:**

> Standard disclaimers for this type of premise, because I don't feel comfortable leaving them out: this is a work of fiction, featuring fictional characters from an ongoing scripted series. The experience I base the details on is my own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for contemplation of the side effects of anxiety meds.

This was it. The moment of truth.

It didn't look like much. Thomas was sitting on the side of his bed, a glass of water in one hand and a small, round white pill in the other. But this was either going to go well or terribly, and there was no way to know which until he took the pill.

He looked over at the only other person in the room — for certain definitions of "other," at any rate. The casually-dressed young man was watching him intently from the safety of the purple and black hood pulled over his head. A faint sense of anxiety bounced between them. It was almost funny to think that the cause of this anxiety was the medication that was supposed to make them both _less_ anxious.

Virgil, the Anxious Side, had lost control. He had tried so hard not to let it hurt Thomas, but matters had gotten bad enough that he couldn't prevent it either by himself or in concert with other Sides. So it had come to this: an outside help. Ideally, it would help Virgil keep things in perspective and take some of the load off of him. If the medication bounced off of Thomas' brain chemistry wrong, though, it could potentially drive Virgil further out of balance, or else make him too loopy to work at all, or go wrong in any number of other ways. The chances of all these outcomes were pretty low, but when you were already anxious... well.

No pressure, right?

“So this is going to make things easier on you?” Thomas checked one last time. They’d been over this again and again, but he still had to be _sure._

“That’s the idea,” Virgil confirmed one more time. He’d been instrumental in talking Thomas into this; the host had been afraid of hurting him, but he’d assured him that it would only help.

“Well, then.” Thomas popped the pill into his mouth, lifted the glass to Virgil in a silent toast, and took a long drink.

It would take some time to kick in, of course, but he still felt a bit of a spike in anxiety immediately after swallowing his mouthful. That was it: the point of no return. Like it or not, he was going to ride out the effects of a full dose for as long as they lasted.

“I don't want to be alone tonight, Virge,” he confessed suddenly. “Would you stay with me?”

“Sure,” Virgil replied, just a little too casually. He also said something else, too quietly for Thomas to be quite sure that it was, but it sounded a lot like, _"Anything for you."_


	2. Stay With Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for frank talk about thoroughly counterfactual major character death.

The first thing that Thomas noticed was that he was alone in bed, and that definitely hadn't been the case when he'd fallen asleep.

Blinking slowly, he pulled his eyes open to look around. Virgil had been in his bed, keeping him company, keeping him _safe._ So where was he now?

There was no sign of any of his Sides. The only thing out of the ordinary, in fact, was a folded piece of paper lying on his bedside table. Picking it up, he saw that his name was written on the outside, in what was unmistakably Virgil's careful left-handed scrawl.

Opening it up, Thomas began to read.

And screamed.

vvv

When Thomas arrived in the common area of his own mind, Patton was waiting for him.

“What's up — Thomas?! What's wrong?”

Thomas held out the letter he had found on his nightstand, Virgil's handwriting plainly visible. “It's a... goodbye note,” he explained, half-hushed.

Patton looked horrified. “What—” He scanned the page, his eyes apparently catching on certain phrases. “No! That's not right! Virgil deserves better!”

“And he will _get_ better,” a much more even and precise voice announced in tones of absolute certainty. Both Thomas and Patton turned to see Logan entering the room.

“How are you so sure?” Thomas asked.

Logan held up a piece of paper, addressed to him by Virgil. “I suspect he left one of these for each of us. Upon finding mine, I felt obliged to check on him, as his belief that he would not survive—”

Patton let out a quiet noise of distress, but Logan kept talking.

“—seemed highly improbable on its own, but I did not want to risk being mistaken. He is sleeping, but very much alive and well.”

“I want to see him,” Thomas demanded.

“Understandable. This way.”

vvv

Virgil lay quiet and still on his bed.

“You're sure he's... okay?” Patton asked nervously.

“Absolutely,” Logan confirmed. “As you may recall, one of the known side effects of this medication — particularly when it is first taken, before your body adjusts — is drowsiness, so between that and the fact that he may well have spent the past many _years_ in a state of sleep deprivation, he is simply asleep. But he can be roused, like so—”

Logan poked Virgil hard, provoking the sleeping Anxiety to jerk away with a wordless but plainly understandable grumble of displeasure.

“As long as he does not develop any symptoms of true illness, and wakes naturally within a day's time, I would not worry. I do not know why he believed that the medication would harm him, but the evidence so far suggests that, as I expected, it has not and will not.”

Thomas nodded slowly. “Are you sure he won't be in danger if we wait?”

Logan replied with a brisk nod, “The immediate risks are small, and the long-term risks even less. The chance that it could actually kill him, I would consider roughly comparable to the chance that it could cause you to sprout wings and fly away.”

“One of those options sounds like a lot more fun than the other,” Patton observed.

“How are you so sure?” Thomas wanted to know. It was _unsettling,_ seeing Virgil lying so still, knowing that the protective Side had expected to die...

“Simple. The nature of medication, the reason that you have to take it at intervals, is because it only lasts for a certain period of time and then goes away. Your Sides, on the other hand, are manifestations of your personality, which is largely set. Killing one of us would mean permanently eliminating an aspect of your fundamental nature as a person, which is virtually impossible while you live. So even in the worst likely scenario — if Virgil should be completely incapacitated — all you would have to do, even then, is wait for the medicine to wear off, and he should recover completely.”

Thomas took a deep breath. Logan was making a lot of sense. As much as he hated that Virgil had been unaware that he would live, it was a tremendous relief to have a solid reason to expect to see him healthy again soon. And yet...

“I don't want to leave him alone.”

Thomas and Patton had spoken at the same time. They glanced at each other before Thomas continued on his own, “I believe you and I think you're right, but I want to stay where I can see him anyway, and I don't want him to wake up alone.”

Patton nodded his agreement with the sentiment. 

“Reasonable. He may well experience confusion upon waking, and the fastest way to alleviate that is to have someone present to explain what happened,” Logan noted. “Today is a good day for all of us to rest and adjust anyway.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the chapter I needed most to write. I know that the scenario Virgil discusses in his letter is fairly popular in the fandom, to the point of being considered a "classic" trope, but it's extremely distressing to me because I reached the point, about a year or two ago, where I could no longer function without anxiety meds. I probably would have benefited from some medication as much as a decade earlier than I got it, but I refused until I reached the point where I was in too much distress to do anything, in not-insignificant part because of believing the things that Logan points out are impossible during this chapter. So this is my way of saying, for the sake of anyone who is where I was, that it's all falsehoods. Medication _cannot_ change who you are as a person; at best, it helps you be yourself more effectively. If you feel uncomfortable or not like yourself on meds, you absolutely can talk to your doctor about safely switching or stopping, because the person you are at baseline isn't going anywhere.


End file.
